Garrett Wilson

Mumblings about being an Inadequate Teacher

May 10, 2016 at 03:08 pm

Little by little this thing gets closer and closer. There was this event in
the distant future: the outgoing SM retreat. Well, that just happened. Unreal.
And now, the health workshop happened too, as did the crash-course in
teaching.

At the outgoing SM retreat I shared the same feeling as a few others, that
it feels so close and we just wanted to go do this. We're excited. I get home
and suddenly the realization hits that there's a lot to do before then. I have
to survive this quarter. Though, that is starting to look promising. And, I
have a long way to go to be a good teacher.

After the crash-course in teaching, I am now starting to realize how much
work it will be being a teacher. I have no idea what I'm getting into. I have
presented on a few different topics in classes recently, but it took me forever
to plan a talk on Bayesian Networks for Intro to AI, a talk on Spatial
Databases for Intro to Database Systems, and now a talk on PID controllers in
State Space form and maybe Auto-tuning PID controllers for Digital Control. I
don't have time to plan something like 7 classes every day if they take this
long. Granted, the topics are going to be material I already know fairly well.
I'll know most of the math, but I won't know how to teach it.

As I looked out during my Bayesian Networks, Spatial Databases, a simple
compiler, etc. talks, I didn't get the impression that I was conveying the
material in an interesting and understandable way. Yet, on a different
presentation, I have gotten comments that my senior project team made our
machine learning explanations simple enough to understand, so maybe there is
hope.

As a TA in Data Structures, I try to answer student's questions and somehow
cannot word things well enough that they understand how to do it. I see
students struggling but don't know to make them understand. I can do what
they're trying to do, but I don't know how to show them how to do it.
Explaining a coding challenge is one thing. I can tell them how to do what they
want in C++. Explaining how they should restructure their program since they're
not really going about this the right way is much harder. Unless I do it for
them. But then they don't learn much.

What do I want them to learn? What should you come away from school knowing?
How to learn? How to be motivated? How to interact with people? Provide
evidence of having a certain basis skill set?

I came into college knowing how to program. I wanted to take the programming
sequence anyway since I had never had formal programming training and there
were bits and pieces I didn't know. I didn't learn because of an amazing class.
I just used the class as an opportunity to program, gaining more practice.

I came into Digital Control class having taken Feedback and Control but not
really knowing anything. First day: chose your projects. Shoot. I know nothing.
Time to freak out and frantically read the book trying to catch up only to find
out that I've done more in the class than anybody else so far (not really
abnormal if I like a class or project). The professor has said he wants us to
be able to learn on our own since most of us are about to graduate. So, yeah,
apparently I can do that. How do I get students to dive into a subject they're
interested in even if I'm not that great at teaching it?

A student has a question. We sit there staring at the screen. Nope. No idea.
I've output strings to the console so many times in the past and never had a
problem. We call over the professor. She stares at the screen making a few
suggestions. After trying a variety of things, I tell the student to copy and
paste the error message into Google. Stack Overflow. Forgot the "#include
<string>" at the top of the C++ program. Problem solved. In many instances, if
I had the questions students (or friends or parents or coworkers) ask I would
have first went to Google if I had not in the past run into the problem (see
Xkcd #627 -- and that is not really a
joke).

I was helping people survive the calculus classes. Was I actually hindering
them by the way I was helping them? It's great for me, having an opportunity to
explain everything, since then I end up really knowing the material. I did
great in those classes. They didn't do as well. Am I partly to blame? I wonder
if I should be teaching them how to find the answers. I would struggle for
hours on those WebWork problems. If they would too, they probably would come
away knowing the material better. Am I holding them back by my teaching
strategies, telling them how to solve a problem rather than telling them how
I'd approach figuring out how to solve the problem? Or, is this maybe more of a
motivational issue?

Really I want them to come away having the motivation to go do and learn how
to do awesome stuff. Maybe not in programming, but in some field. I don't know
how to do that. I'm teaching some STEM camps at Sunset Lake this summer, so by
the time I get to Yap, I'll at least have had a little bit of experience
teaching something related.